Everything WRONG with 'defensive points'

 

I ran through the other big changes to FPL this season a couple of days ago, but this is the really HUGE one, and I thought it needed a post of its own.

In the first change to the basic scoring system since the game's inception 20-odd years ago, FPL is all-of-a-sudden proposing to give additional points for defensive actions: players will now earn 2 points if they register 10 or more clearances, blocks, interceptions, or tackles in a game. (Midfielders and forwards are eligible for these points too, but very unlikely to qualify [apart from your ball-winning monsters like Caicedo and Rodri!] - even with the token lift of gaining credit also for ball recoveries.)

There are more than a few things wrong with this.....

1)  All change is unwelcome, because it disrupts continuity

Especially changes to the fundamental points structure of the game! We like to have ready comparability of data - for ourselves and for players - between the current season and previous ones. That goes out of the window as soon as you start tinkering with points allocations. (This was a principal objection to the introduction of the 'Assistant Manager' option last season - a three-week 'bonus chip' that offered the prospect of perhaps 80 or more additional points in the season.)

2)  All change is unwelcome, because it confounds predictability

Tinkering with the points system skews the fundamental dynamics of the game. FPL has suddenly realised that the game's points structure is 'unfair' to defensive players?! But it - and every other similar game - has had this 'problem' for decades now, and it has shaped our entire approach to Fantasy management. This is why defenders (and defensive midfielders) are priced so much lower than other outfield players, why we don't allocate so much of our budget to them, why we usually only ever start three of them, why we're content to have one or two weak (occasionally even non-starting) defenders on our bench at the start of the season to stretch the budget....  Is all of this now going to change?? If it is, we need more information about the possible impact of the changes,... and more warning of their implementation. [See further below]

3)  'Cumulative' actions as a basis for points are clunky

At present, all direct points awards are made for single - obvious, relatively straightforward - game events (well, apart from goalkeeper 'saves', where the counting is highly dubious, and you only get 1 point for every 3 'saves' credited). There may occasionally be problems of attribution (especially with 'assists' and 'own goals'), but essentially you know when one of your players has scored direct points (rather than 'bonus points', which are vexingly opaque). Awarding points on a ticker, where your guy only qualifies for them after reaching an arbitrary total of (multiple different) game actions is going to be a completely opaque process: we won't often have any idea when our players have earned these points - we're just going to have to take it entirely on trust from FPL (and Opta, or whoever). That in itself is fundamentally unsatisfying. But it is also rife with the potential for controversy over 'miscounting': how vexing will it be if your star centreback or midfield stopper is only credited with 8 or 9 'defensive actions' when you feel quite sure he racked up substantially more than that?  Even more vexing, perhaps, when a powderpuff player owned by one of your arch-rivals gets credited with 10 'defensive actions' out of nowhere, while your much more robust defensive choice is unaccountably spurned... (We have far too much of this already with the impenetrable eccentricities of the Bonus Points System!!)

4)  Completely unclear how this is going to be tallied

No definitions are offered for any of these actions (much less illustrative examples); so, many of them are inevitably going to be ambiguous, contentious. There is a lot of scope for overlap between the four (five) different varieties of eligible action: is a player to receive double, or even triple credit if an action falls into more than one category - if, for example, a 'tackle' also results in a 'clearance'; or where an 'interception' leads to a 'ball recovery'?  At the moment, we have no clue. (And one suspects the FPL bigwigs haven't even thought about this...)  Do you suppose they'll even share with us the 'defensive contributions' total for every player in the Gameweek (fully itemised for the different eligible categories)? They bloody well ought to, but I fear they might not...

5)  A perverse points structure

Why is the threshold for earning these points set so high? Why do we immediately move from 0 points to 2 points, making that threshold even more crucial?  Why is the 'defensive points' award capped at ONE per game??  (A player who registers 22 eligible actions in a game is only going to get the same reward as someone who dubiously scrapes over the line with a supposed count of 10? How is that fair??)  Surely - if we were going to start acknowledging defensive contributions in this way - it would have made far more sense to offer 1 extra point for every so many elgible actions (6 or 8, perhaps)?

6)  Uncertain impact

From similar experiments in other tournaments (points were awarded for 'ball recoveries' in Fantasy Euros last summer, for instance), it had appeared that very few players were ever managing to register more than 3 'defensive actions' (as mysteriously 'defined' by the game's rulers) in a single game, and it thus seemed that achieving a game total of 10 - even for a broad range of such actions - might be nearly impossible. However, FPL has revealed that a few players, at least, managed to do it 20 times last season! That could represent a seismic shift for FPL. But, so far, the game's authorities have only shared with us token 'top ten' lists of the defenders and midfielders who would have performed best under this points regime last season. We need far more information than this to guide our selections this season: we need to know every player's projected performance for last year (and, ideally, for a few years further back than that - maybe even for every season that they've played in the Premier League). Where this change is likely to have most impact is with cheaper defenders who score particularly well on this metric, and may possibly have a 10-15 point advantage on it over some of their more expensive colleagues, or at least over their same-priced peers. But we have no idea who those players might be!

7)  Abrupt introduction, lack of adequate preparation (consultation, trials!)

As I mentioned in my post on the other new changes this season, FPL really ought not to introduce any changes - certainly not one as major and as massively disruptive as this - without careful pre-planning. Ideally, that should include extensive consultation with its community, and also some public trialling of the new points rules. It is not enough to provide a few gobbets of selective information about their impact for a handful of players; we need to have been able to watch those potential impacts unfolding in real time, for every player - over at least the second half of last season.

8)  No thought given to the knock-on effects through the rest of the game?!

If this change is really going to mean that substantial numbers of defenders and defensive midfielders (30 or 40 of them, maybe more?) might be capable of earning at least 30-40 additional points per season, that is a very substantial change to the dynamics of the game - and it ought to be reflected in the pricing. Thus far, it appears not to have been. This could be an unmerited windfall for FPL managers this season, offering us unexpected value in some players we'd usually spurn (but FPL hasn't given us enough information to make shrewd choices about this in our initial squads; we're going to have to keep our eyes peeled in the opening weeks of the season, to see where the most appealing bargains might be). But I don't think that can be sustainable going forward. Player prices - and the points potential represented by your squad budget - are inextricably tied to the total points potential in the game. If you increase the points potential by changing the scoring system, that must have an inflationary impact on player values. And unless you can pull off some chicanery with 'resetting' the relative values of players, pruning prices elsewhere to compensate for the rise in value of top defenders and defensive midfielders (though that too is likely to be value-distorting, making some players exaggeratedly more attractive because 'underpriced'), you're going to have to increase the budget cap too. FPL doesn't seem to have given any thought to any of this yet.

My hunch is that these new 'defensive points' will, for the most part, prove to be nothing but a costly distraction. The main drawback in them is that players are likely to score highest on these new metrics in games where their team is under the cosh - and thus they're very unlikely to pick up clean sheets (or any attacking contributions) at the same time. That trade-off means that, in any given run of games, they probably won't in fact score better than the players you would more likely have selected in the past. 

They might, however, represent 'better value' - for the last one or two spots in your starting eleven, especially early in the season when budget is tight - over an extended run of games, if they can chip in these extra points with a dependable regularity. The top performers in this category look like they could be getting into contention for your final budget picks to fill out the initial squad. Or perhaps rather, the top value-for-money defensive choices - buoyed by this addition to their points haul - could be appealing choices for the squad-filler places; those might well be not the highest total points-producers, but cheaper, generally quite unfancied players who unexpectedly pick up 10 or 20 points more than most of their defensive peers from the new rule.

But, in the midfield, regular goalscorers are certainly going to continue to offer far more points. And even in defence, despite the the sharp shift in the past couple of seasons away from having full-backs link up with the wide attackers and make frequent overlapping runs into the final third, players who pick up frequent clean sheets and/or offer a significantly higher chance of attacking contributions are still likely to be higher points producers.

These new 'defensive points' might ultimately prove to be just a bothersome irrelevance. But it's the uncertainty I can't stand. There was NO NEED to introduce a change like this. It's just thrown a spanner in the works!

# NoMoreChanges

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-CHANGES

 

Dear, oh dear - over this past weekend FPL Towers suddenly unleashed a deluge of announcements about changes to the game for the coming season: all completely unnecessary - and at best, ill thought-out, at worst, likely to be highly detrimental.

I said last year, amid the dismay and horror induced by the introduction of the vile 'Assistant Manager' chip,  that I feared even worse things might follow on from it in succeeding seasons. And such now is indeed happening. The folks in charge of our game seem to be desperately pursuing 'innovation' - presumably just to grab more attention for the game, to try to attract new players to join it,.... but evidently without giving any proper consideration to whether these changes are needed or useful.

They fail to appreciate that continuity is perhaps the chiefest virtue in a game like this: continuity, clarity, consistency,.. and hence predictability.

A wise man said, "If it ain't broke, don't break it."

FPL's exectives need to take that message onboard. 

So, what are these changes?? Well, I'll try to briefly run through each of them, and explain why I'm unhappy with them.

1)  Multiple Extra Transfers for AFCON

We are apparently to receive a gift of extra Free Transfers (up to a maximum of 5) ahead of GW16 in mid-December, to make it easier to cope with members of our squads departing for the African Cup of Nations tournament. 

Completely unnecessary. It's only in every other cycle of AFCON that it more or less coincides with the Asian Cup, potentially depriving us of talents like Salah and Marmoush and Mitoma and Son at the same time. This is not one of those years: we only have to worry about African players. You're unlikely to ever have more than 4 or 5 of those at a time, probably far fewer; and it's really not difficult to move them out of your squad in advance - so long as you remember the African competition is happening! (With one or two top players, like Salah, it can be better to just leave them on your bench anyway - if they've gained a lot in value since you bought them, and you don't want to run the risk of losing that if you sell with a heavy hit from 'transfer tax', and then maybe have to buy back at more than you sold them for.)  And since the introduction last year of the rule allowing us now to save up to 5 Free Transfers (a rare - thus far, unique - example of an FPL rules tweak that actually makes sense and is an improvement to the game!), we could easily have dealt with this minor speedbump by saving up some of our regular transfers over the month or so preceding. All this new transfer allowance does is.... compel us to use up every one of our available transfers in GW15, so that we can feel we're fully taking advantage of it. Utterly bloody pointless!

This is a rule-change that is plainly just pandering to the more incompetent FPL managers - who couldn't remember to wipe their own bottoms if you didn't hand them the toilet-paper and a set of instructions on how to use it.

2)  TWO sets of chips

Yes, FPL is now giving us TWO of everything: 2 x Wildcards, 2 x Free Hits, 2 x Bench Boosts, 2 x Triple Captains - one of each for each half of the season.

Again, completely unnecessary.  We have generally only needed a Wildcard and Free Hit to deal with major fixture disruptions caused by the Cup competitions in the final third of the season; and there is a strong argument that even those aren't so necessary any more, since the really big Blank/Double Gameweek problem used to arise as a result of the FA Cup Quarter-Finals weekend - which no longer clashes with the Premier League schedule. Similarly, most people prefer to use their two bonus chips later in the season, particularly if one of the Double Gameweeks that happen then looks especially favourable. Extra chips in the first half of the season have comparatively little value, and there's certainly no pressing need for them.

And again, it's pandering to the less thoughtful, more superficial FPL managers, especially those who enjoy the game mainly for the thrill of gambling - taking silly chances on risks they haven't properly assessed. Those people would like to have a bonus chip in play EVERY WEEK.  And the way things are going,... FPL might soon make that wish come true for them. I - and most serious players of the game - will have quit long before that happens.

3)  Revision to the definition of 'assists'

Now, in principle, I'm not against this rule adjustment. I have complained many times about how players often seem to be denied an 'assist' purely because a lunging defender has got a toe-end to the pass they've played, even though that intervention sometimes does not drastically deflect the ball, and obviously does not prevent it from reaching the teammate who's going to score from it. Kaoru Mitoma seemed to be particularly hard done-by in this way: I think he's probably been unjustly denied at least 3 or 4 assists a season.

FPL has at least recognised that the core of this problem is the wildly subjective element of interpreting whether the eventual goalscorer was the originally 'intended recipient' of a partially intercepted pass, and are seeking to introduce more clarity and simplicity into the awarding of assists by scrapping this part of the definition.

However, this adjustment doesn't go nearly far enough. And probably only one or two freak cases like Mitoma may derive any noticeable benefit from it; otherwise, there will be just a handful of isolated instances through the year where it comes into play, for a different player each time. There are so many other problems with the concept of 'assists' - such as the fact that a player can receive credit for simply laying the ball off a mere foot or two, and indeed even for an unintended play such as an accidental deflection or a complete miskick. And I've long railed against the unfairness that the 'pre-assist' - the penultimate pass, which, far more often than the actual 'assist', is the one that really creates the goalscoring chance - gets no recognition at all, either in direct points or under the BPS (Cole Palmer might have a 400-point season in him if it did!!).

Moreover, FPL seem to have wilfully shot themselves in the foot even over this simple and uncontroversial enhancement to the rules - by introducing an arbitrary distinction between goal attempts inside and outside the penalty area; for some unfathomable reason, 'assisting' players will not get the benefit of this definition tweak if the goal is scored from outside the area. Now, probably this will crop up rarely, if ever; but whenever it does, it will create a new - and quite justified - sense of grievance,... as well as giving the potential for additional controversy as to where exactly the scoring player received the ball. Just completely NUTS!

4)  Tweaks to the BPS

Again, I'm in sympathy with the idea - but here it's been done in such an inept and half-arsed way that it's really just an annoyance rather than an improvement. These changes are utterly superficial, they barely even scratch the surface of the problems with the BPS.

All players are now to get the same BPS credits for scoring a penalty, which seems fair and reasonable; but it's still far too many credits, compared to the BPS rewards for most other game actions. And the fact that forwards still get way more BPS credit for scoring a non-penalty goal than other positions really makes no sense at all. Likewise, keepers are now getting 1 additional BPS credit for saving an attempt from inside the penalty box: again, it's still far too few points, given that a save - at least a really top-class one - is as valuable to a team as a goal at the other end; and creating the potential for controversy over whether shots from the very edge of the box were 'inside' or 'outside' (there is no need to make things more complicated, rather than less so). Goalkeepers are having their BPS credit for a 'penalty save' trimmed ever so slightly (too little to have any impact!); but they're still getting additional credit for a regular 'shot stopped' too - WHY???  Plus, of course, they already earn a massive direct points lift from a penalty save; and there seems to be no published definition of what constitutes a 'save' - do they still get those points and BPS credits if the opponent just skies it over the bar (because the keeper put him off...)?? It should now be a little bit easier for defensive players to get into bonus points contention if they make a lot of tackles, because their BPS score on that is now to be determined by 'successful' tackles rather than 'net' tackles (the surplus of tackles 'won' over tackles 'lost'); it's a bit more difficult to gauge how much of an impact this change might have, and it would seem fair and appropriate to tilt the balance of the BPS a little more towards defenders, since they mostly get close-to-zero recognition from it - but again, the number of credits awarded for a successful tackle is so small that a defensive player is really going to need to have a monster of a game to overhaul another player who's scored even one goal. The best tweak of the bunch is a substantial lift in the number of BPS credits given for a goalmouth clearance - but again, it's nowhere near as many as is given for a goal (and again, no definition is offered as to how close to the goal the clearance needs to be, or if it has to be a clearly deliberate action rather than just being-fortutiously-in-the-way of a shot).

I discussed the shortcomings of the BPS in some detail at the end of last season. As I see it, an effective overhaul of the system needs to reduce or eliminate 'double recovery' (at present, the BPS massively favours major game actions - goals, assists, saves - that are already rewarded with direct points,... while completely overlooking almost every other aspect of play. The BPS should cover a far greater variety of game actions, should drastically reduce the weight given to game actions that directly earn points, and should increase the weighting of other important actions - in both attack and defence - that do not directly earn points. That shouldn't be too difficult to sort out.

5)  New 'Elite' Leagues

This season, special leagues have been created for the 'Top 1%' and the 'Top 10%', on last season's performance.

Reasonable enough (for once...); in fact, long overdue (I'd always kind of assumed that leagues like this existed already!). The problem here is a dangerous lack of specificity: it hasn't been stated how those rankings are going to be calculated. I fear it's going to be done on the 'Overall' League - which might invite very ambitious folks who find themselves only a little outside eligibility to fire up some bot-farms to create hundreds - possibly even hundreds of thousands, or millions - of dummy accounts in the closing weeks of the season: accounts that serve no other  purpose than to inflate the total number of 'participants' and so increase the size of these 'elite' leagues for the following season. (Of course, this could be - and might be - done from the very start of the season, but I think the prospect of qualifying is going to be too remote and uncertain for anyone to think it's worth the trouble that far ahead.)

It would have made far more sense for FPL to specify that eligibility was going to be decided by standings in the 'Week 1' League - because all serious players make sure they're signed up before the start of the season; and anyone who does manage to get into the upper reaches of the rankings despite having missed out one or two whole weeks must necessarily have been absurdly lucky (even more absurdly lucky than all the people who managed it over 38 weeks; you just can't get anywhere near the top 1% in this game without being extraordinarily, outrageously lucky).

6)  Lots of new AI bells-and-whistles

We haven't seen yet what this is going to entail (apart from the silly gimmick of offering you the option of an AI-generated 'team badge' - and, really, who gives a flying fuck about that?!), but apparently it's going to be kind of an automating of 'The Scout' to give managers 'customized advice' every week.

More help for the clueless 'casual' player is really not what we want in the game; it just undermines the advantages that should reasonably be enjoyed by people who give their selections a bit more attention. I've seen a number of folks on the forums recently who've griped - not unreasonably - that 'The Scout' is already quite bad enough, reminding folks of stuff they really shouldn't need to be reminded of, and highlighting players who've come into top form. The only thing I console myself with is that - at the moment - people who lean heavily on 'The Scout's advice probably aren't doing all that well from it, because 'he' tends to throw up a mixture of mediocre and often outright terrible tips along with the good ones, and even on the good ones, 'he's usually rather late-to-the-party. And I don't suppose the full AI 'Scout' experience will be any better; at least, not at first. In another two or three years, perhaps the whole game of FPL will have just become computers playing against other computers. I'm sure there are already a lot of idiots out there asking ChatGPT to pick their squads.

7)  And.... ah, bless, they're on Whatsapp now

This may be an appealing development for those who live their lives on their smartphones. I resolutely abjure that lifestyle, so being able to receive content through Whatsapp is of zero interest to me.

This, I fear, is just a sign of how out of touch the folks at FPL are. Whatsapp has been a thing for, what, getting on for 15 years now; and increasingly ubiquitous over the last 7 or 8 years at least, as Facebook has progressively run itself into the ground. And they're only just establishing a Whatsapp account NOW? Heck, even I, the King of the Luddites, considered getting Whatsapp (and rejected the idea) several years ago....

8)  Some changes to the appearance too...

I haven't really spent any time on the site yet, but it looks as though the changes are all trivial, superficial, worthless: for the most part, they seem as though they're trying to make the web version look more like the mobile app - which may bring some 'improvement' for mobile users, but actually just makes things that little bit more irritating when you're logging in via a computer. 

I briefly entertained hopes that they might have done something to improve the godawful 'Player Info' screen (the leading recommendation for changes to the interface among many that I compiled at the end of the season); but in fact, they've made it even harder to navigate by making it SMALLER, rather than BIGGER (and it's still got those bloody - fiddly, hidden - slider bars!!! Aaaargh!!!). The only very small positive I've been able to find so far is that the 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' list now includes 9 gameweeks in its visible field rather than just 7 (though I very much doubt if they're going to allow you to scan back through previous weeks as well as future ones; we'll have to wait and see on that - another one of my many recommendations).

And, oh, I missed one..... yep, they're introducing a potentially HUGE & DISRUPTIVE change to the basic points system too. But that one will need a whole post of its own - in another day or two.

So, to my mind, really none of these changes has been unequivocally positive. Even the few that were seeking to address genuine issues of concern have done so in a frustratingly incomplete, inept manner. The larger ones, I would say, seem harmful rather than beneficial.

But even if these changes were better thought-out, I still wouldn't want to see so many of them launched upon us all together - and so suddenly, with no advance warning.

We really want stability in this game of ours: we want to see as few changes as possible.

I'd say, ideally, we don't want to see a MAJOR CHANGE more than about once every 3-5 years. 

And that quota's been filled for a good long way ahead by the introduction of the '5 Free Transfers' rule (a rare good innovation!) last year. We could do without any more tinkering until towards the end of the decade now, at the very least.

And good grief, if you are going to introduce MAJOR CHANGES (like the doubled chips and extra AFCON transfers and the defensive points), that sort of thing ought only to be done after public consultation with your community and extensive - public - trialling (show us examples of the changes in action, live, during the preceding season).

The information overload FPL visited on us this weekend was just a complete dog's breakfast. It made our FPL overlords look as if they shouldn't be left in charge of a village fete.

# NoMoreChanges

TOO MUCH of a BAD THING!!

The first few announcements about this season's player price changes finally started to drop on Sunday evening (obviously the ideal time to publish important notices!!). Usually, FPL likes to spin this process out over at least one week, sometimes more like two. And this year they are trying to boost 'user engagement' by supposedly running polls on their new Whatsapp account to determine whose price will be revealed next. This suggests that we might yet have to wait quite a while for the game to be relaunched.

The hold-up this year is likely due to an advertised incorporation of a bunch of new AI bells-and-whistles into the game (essentially automating 'The Scout' to give personalized player recommendations.... so that no-one has to pick their own teams any more??). I think that is something we could really live without. The headlong stampede towards the premature adoption of AI in every facet of online life has already RUINED Google, and Youtube (where at least half of new content, and just about 100% of the ads now seem to be entirely AI-generated). That kind of new software integration really needs a lot of testing (if it is to be done right; sadly, I suspect it won't be!), and that is almost certainly why the relaunch is already a week or so later than it has been in most recent years, and looks like it might still be another week or so away.

[Well, at least they did get the game live again on Monday evening! I suspect FPL Towers felt pressured into doing so more quickly than they had wanted because the intensity of the backlash from their community had been getting too much for them: every one of their inane new teaser posts - or announcements of yet another unnecessary change to the game dynamics - over the past few days had met with a torrent of scorn and derision and mounting wrathful impatience online.

Of course, the relaunch didn't go entirely smoothly. They still haven't cured the longstanding glitch that your password gets 'forgotten' every year, and you start off being apparently locked out of your account, having to go through a vexing password reset procedure (just to restore your original password...). Then, only the app version of the game appeared to be working, the web version still frozen in a perpetual 'update'; and many were reporting functionality problems on the app too. By Tuesday morning (still barely after midnight, UTC) things seemed to have got straightened out; but it was an inauspicious start to the new season.]

Oh, but wait - THERE'S MORE. Much, much MORE!!!

Over this past weekend, FPL has started up a fair old barrage of information-drops on other topics, a veritable TSUNAMI OF SHIT. There are to be major CHANGES to the game this season. And not just 1 or 2,..... but 3 or 4 or 5..... or??  Honestly, I've lost count. And it seems we might not be done yet! Even my planet-sized brain is overwhelmed, struggling to process all of this.

I will try to put out brief posts analysing - and criticising - each of the new changes at some point over the next few days. But first, we'd better wait for them to stop with this sensory overload.

One FPL commentator I occasionally follow has aptly summed up this MESS thus: "It's as if they asked ChatGPT for suggestions to improve the game, and then just ran with every single answer."

GOD HELP US! The folks at FPL Towers, the ones in charge of the game's design, are obviously a bunch of incompetent morons who are intent on destroying the game we so love. I am seriously tempted to abandon the official Fantasy Premier League for one of the rival versions run by newspapers and broadcasters and so on.

# NoMoreChanges

BOYCOTT the New Chip!

 

I have written before about why I think FPL's silly innovation of the 'Assistant Manager' Chip is a terrible idea in principle (and also about why it's badly thought out, and severely impractical, difficult/dangerous to use...).

And I mentioned in those posts that I was so appalled by it that I am inclined to quit the game in protest - when the new chip becomes available, after Gameweek 23.  (You could just refuse to use the chip; but I don't think that will be a sufficiently clear and emphatic denunciation of its introduction into the game. Others - probably the great majority - will use it. And since it is likely to be worth far more points than both of the other bonus chips combined, it will effectively determine overall rank outcomes for the season on its own. If you soldier on in the game without using the chip, you'll have to suffer a really terrible end to your season....  I'd rather just not bother.)

You might perhaps find this new chip merely a tolerable irritation for this one season only; maybe even you're intrigued by the challenge it poses.

But if you like 'challenges' you can do Bridge problems or Sudoku. The game of Fantasy Premier League already presents a well-defined challenge - and this innovation falls utterly outside of that existing definition. It is a completely new game, grafted on to the old one - and spoiling it.

And the danger is that if we tolerate it now, it will become a permanent feature of the game, and RUIN IT for all time. (With the further - horrific - possibility that, additionally or instead, other bizarre new rule changes will now be introduced every year.... to keep up a continual 'novelty factor'!!)  I DON'T WANT THAT; and I don't think anyone with any sense, anyone who truly loves the game of FPL, does either.

So, I'd like to propose that we start trying to organise a boycott. Denounce The New Chip online at every opportunity. And if you, like me, decide it's appropriate to quit the game in protest - do so straight after the close of Gameweek 23. And make sure EVERYBODY knows why you've done it.

We can beat this thing. But it's going to take a lot of effort....

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip

The biggest PROBLEM with the 'Assistant Manager' chip

 

I've already explained why I so dislike this vile novelty chip the FPL powers-that-be are foisting on us this year - briefly here, and in elaborate detail here.

There are a number of irksome obstacles to deploying the damn thing at all (which may perhaps be enough to dissuade some people from bothering to use it). 

Many on the online forums have been bitching most about the 'transfer charge' for your selected manager for the chip, complaining that it overstrains an already inadequate player budget. I think that's a greatly overstated complaint: the sums are relatively trivial, and shouldn't have much of an impact on your squad strength. But the initial purchase of your manager is likely to necessitate you having to sell at least 1,... maybe 2 or 3, or even 4 players in order to free up the necessary cash; and that is a substantial irritation.

A rather greater irritation, to my mind, is the restriction of your per-club player quota - meaning that you will be denied the opportunity to bring in a third player from the same club as your selected manager.

However, both of these annoyances pale into insignificance beside the three-week duration of the chip - coupled with the prohibition of using more than one chip at a time (it was not originally specified that the new chip would be bound by this old rule; but that point has now been clarified - to everyone's disadvantage). Being blocked from the possibility of using any other chip for three whole gameweeks is a HUGE handicap - one that should perhaps make all of us question whether we want to use this chip at all. Its potential rewards are indeed enormous (game-distorting, unfair), but the risks attendant upon it could also prove to be quite disastrous.

There are TWO 'blank gameweeks' in the latter part of the season (when some teams will miss their scheduled league fixtures because of the League Cup Final or the FA Cup Semi-Finals), followed by a pair of Double Gameweeks, in which the clubs who had games postponed will make them up by playing twice in a few days, within the same gameweek. There will now be an additional Double Gameweek, just for Liverpool and Everton (replacing the fixture cancelled a couple of weeks ago because of Storm Darragh). There may yet be others added to the schedule, because of more severe weather or other unexpected events.

Blank Gameweeks can affect multiple teams, and can easily wipe out half or more of your squad. And so, you really want to try to keep your Free Hit available to help protect you from the potentially devastating consequences of a big - and perhaps quite unexpected - Blank Gameweek.

Double Gameweeks are prized as particularly good occasions to try to take advantage of the game's regular bonus chips, the Triple Captain and Bench Boost. And it is often desirable to 'set up' for the Bench Boost by playing the second Wildcard a week or so before the target Double Gameweek, to optimise the squad (getting in as many players with double-fixtures as possible, and as many players as possible with the best fixtures) and to try to ensure that you will have a full bench for that week (which is the first essential for a successful Bench Boost).

Rescheduled fixtures typically only have their dates confirmed a fairly short time ahead. At the moment, there is still no date fixed for the postponed Everton v Liverpool match. It seems likeliest that it can be slotted into Gameweek 25 or Gameweek 28, or perhaps even as late as Gameweek 33.  But it is very possible that we still won't know when it is to be played when the 'Assistant Manager' chip first becomes available (after the deadline of Gameweek 23). Since almost everyone who hasn't yet used their Triple Captain chip is now hoping to play it on Mo Salah in that unique Double Gameweek for Liverpool, those people will probably feel precluded from trying to use the new chip until a new date for that missed Merseyside derby is announced.

Having the Free Hit available to help negotiate the Blank Gameweeks in GW29 (League Cup Final) or GW34 (FA  Cup Semi-Finals) is probably even more valuable - if not essential. 

And the 'BIG' Double Gameweek following the postponements for the FA Semis (probably in GW36 or 37, but possibly earlier; GW33 also looks like an 'available slot') is the prime opportunity this season - the only obviously good one - to use the Bench Boost chip.

Because we don't know exactly when these Double Gameweeks will be - and we might not know for sure until just a week or two beforehand! - it's pretty much impossible to plan how to use the 'Assistant Manager' chip..... either to take advantage of them with that chip, or to avoid them so that we can use other chips instead. The bloated three-week duration of the chip makes it completely unmanageable.

So, many managers would probably have preferred to use a multi-week chip straight away in January. After that, there are few if any convenient gaps in the schedule that would allow you to play it without messing up your plans for your other chips. But the churlish FPL gnomes have strangely decided to delay the launch of the new 'Assistant Manager' chip until the beginning of February - so, it is now really difficult to identify good opportunities to use it without compromising, or completely abandoning, your original chip strategy. Most of us are looking at trying fit 7 weeks of chip play into just 15 gameweeks - and that's a huge headache.

Now, as I mentioned the other day, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is going to be worth far more than either of the two existing bonus chips - and probably far more than both of them combined - so it might be worth sacrificing your previous plans for these other chips in order to try to maximise your return from the new chip. Some folks have conjectured that it could be worth more to play the 'Assistant Manager' chip in a Double Gameweek (although I think it would probably not yield as much as a good Bench Boost return from a DGW; and perhaps not even quite as much as a really good Triple Captain return, unless you manage to successfully exploit the bonus for a result against a much higher-placed team in at least one of the two fixtures).

But this all becomes insanely complex to try to calculate. Because.... there are very limited opportunities to get a good return from any of the bonus chips; and so, where it seems that the 'best' week for two (or now, all three) of them might be the same, you have to try to estimate whether 'Chip A in Best Week' + 'Chip B in Second Best Week' is likely to be worth more or less than 'Chip B in Best Week' + 'Chip A in Second Best Week'. That's plenty hard enough with just two bonus chips that both benefit from Double Gameweeks; adding in a third - which has a longer duration, and might conceivably wipe out two opportunities (two Double Gameweek opportunities!) to play the other chips - makes it close-to-uncomputable.

Moreover, it can be really valuable to stay flexible - and opportunistic - in your approach to the bonus chips. It may be that at a certain point in the season, you find yourself with an unexpectedly strong bench, and suddenly - for the first time in ages -  everyone appears to be fit and likely to start.... in a week (though only a regular Single Gameweek) where almost everyone has a really good fixture. When circumstances come together for you like that, it's probably going to be your best chance to use the Bench Boost chip - much better than gambling on getting good fixtures in a Double Gameweek (because you don't know for sure who's going to be playing who until very shortly beforehand) and that you're going to have everyone still be fit for it (even if you 'set up' with a Wildcard in the week before, you can still be hit by a rash of last-minute injuries); this is particularly so when, this year, there's seemingly only going to be ONE 'big' Double Gameweek, and it doesn't fall until the very end of the season.

Something similar might happen with a Triple Captain opportunity. Although it's obviously much more difficult to get 15 fit players in your squad in a week when nearly all of them have good fixtures than it is to ensure that one of your handful of star players is fit to play in one of his most promising fixtures, and there are thus usually several tempting opportunities to risk the TC chip in a season,.... nevertheless, unexpected shifts in team form can suddenly make it appear that your best player's best chance of a big haul is in a different game to any of the ones most anticipated in the early part of the season.... perhaps it may even be in the next game.

Thus, I would argue, ruling yourself out of being able to play either of your bonus chips for three weeks at a time may have an enormous - and perhaps quite unforeseen - opportunity cost.

But ruling yourself out of being able to play the Free Hit could be.... absolutely catastrophic. More widespread and serious 'extreme weather' events than Storm Darragh could very conceivably wipe out most or a weekend's fixtures (or, occasionally, even all of them; but at least that's the same for everyone; and we'll all later enjoy an extra - HUGE - Double Gameweek!). So could other forms of disruption, such as a major terrorist incident or widespread industrial action or another pandemic scare, or.... well, King Charles is 76 years old, and hasn't been in the best of health; as we saw with his mother's death two years ago, the passing of a monarch could lead to major fixture rearrangements over two or three gameweeks across a season. 

Such eventualities might be relatively remote, but they're extremely possible. And if such a thing were to occur in a gameweek where someone has their 'Assistant Manager' chip in play..... they are terminally screwed. Small though the risk may appear to be, it's not one I'm sure I'd be willing to take.

But I really don't want to spend any time even attempting to address these endless conundrums. For me, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is a game-ruining abomination - and, in order to make sure that FPL does not try to make it (or, god help us, perhaps some other innovation that's even worse...) a recurring feature of the game, we really need to protest against the idea as strongly as possible, in as many different ways as possible.

I like the idea of simply refusing to use the chip. But I fear it will not be an emphatic enough gesture to have much impact on the FPL hierarchy. (Many FPL managers might simply forget to use the chip, or be too daunted by its complexity; and more and more managers get disillusioned with their progress and drop out of the game during the later stages of the season. So - a mass refusal to use the chip would not become apparent until the last opportunity to deploy it [GW36] has passed; and it might be largely masked by all these other reasons why the chip might have gone unused by many people.)

No, if we are to make the FPL 'bosses' take notice, I think we need to encourage as many people as possible to drop out of the game at the moment that this horrendously gimmicky new chip comes into force - immediately after Gameweek 23. [I did so, quitting after GW23 in hopes of setting an example for others.]

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip

I HATE the 'Assistant Manager' Chip (EXTENDED version)

When the FPL Facebook page first announced the new chip last week, I was so appalled that I left a comment likening the revelation to.... waking up on Christmas morning to find a turd in your stocking.

I explained briefly the other day why I didn't like the newly announced addition to Fantasy Premier League this year - the 'Assistant Manager' Chip to be made available in the second half of the season.

Today I thought I'd take the time to enumerate my objections to it more fully:

1)  It is a radical departure from ALL previous chips introduced in this, or any similar game, or even just mooted for possible introduction.... or dreamed of in jest! Fantasy games for international tournaments have typically had a chip where you can get a doubled-points 'captain' bonus without needing to designate a captain, automatically receiving the addition for your highest-performing player in the gameweek (I like that one...), or a suped-up 'Free Hit' where you can remake your squad for a single gameweek with the additional advantage of having the budget cap removed (just a slight riff on the two 'squad makeover' chips we're familiar with in FPL). Over the past year, FPL has been running occasional 'side games' under the 'Fantasy Challenge' banner, which have offered novelty points systems such as defenders getting more points, or forwards getting more points, or players from particular clubs getting more points - inviting you to consider a major squad makeover for one week, to adapt to this modified points weighting. And this has prompted many FPL managers on the forums to joke about even wackier new bonus possibilities.... such as extra points for players with beards, or players with double-barrelled names (Definitional problem: Does a double-barrelled name have to be hyphenated? Sorry, Emile, yes it does!). But the point about all of these is that they are just small modifications to the existing structure of the game, simply allowing you to earn more points - for one week only - for things you already earn points for.

Sometimes, variations in the rules might allow you to earn points in slightly different ways, for different kinds of game actions. In the last Fantasy Euros tournament, additional points were awarded for 'ball recoveries'; although it was rather unclear how this was defined or tabulated, it did add an interesting extra wrinkle to the game, potentially giving a big boost to the points returns from defenders and defensive midfielders. And the popular Swedish Fantasy Football game, Allsvenskan, does something similar, wtih additional defensive points available for actions like this, and additional attacking points awarded for every 2 'key passes' (rather than faffing around with the obscure and often perversely erratic 'Bonus Points System' that FPL inflicts on us!). But again, these are just small modifications to the points structure: we're still getting points for defined game actions by individual players week by week.

By offering points for team results over a number of weeks, this new chip falls completely OUTSIDE the current scope of the game.

2)  By extending the duration of the chip far beyond that of 'normal' chips (which have until now, without exception, been effective for one gameweek only), by adding in 'charges' for it (a sum of money to be deducted from squad budget and an impact on your club quota for players!), by making it variable from week-to-week (this wasn't mentioned in the early posts about the chip, and I think might be part of a series of subsequent 'revisions' they've made to the rules: you can now change your choice of 'assistant manager' in each of the 3 weeks that the chip is in play). by awarding points for such a swathe of different things (wins and draws and goals and clean sheets.... and additional bonuses for getting a result against teams 5 or more places higher in the table!!), they have made the new chip absurdly over-complicated - needlessly difficult to understand, difficult to evaluate (this alone may, I suspect, put many people off using the bloody thing at all).

3)  The imposition of a 'transfer cost' for your chosen manager is particularly irksome. Although the sums of money demanded are relatively trivial (from 0.5 to 1.5 million), you will - if you're making as close to full use of your budget as possible (which you should always be striving to do!) - find yourself obliged to make at least 1 or 2 transfers to free up some extra cash before you can activate the chip... and make do with a slightly suh-standard squad of players while the chip remains active. Moreover, they've added in (this feature appeared to be absent in the first published version of 'the rules') the provision that subsequent changes of manager choice within the three-week period of the chip being active will cost you a transfer.... so, that's a bummer too.

4)  The additional bonus for team performances against clubs higher in the table seems to me to be a particularly unnecessary over-elaboration. Originally, there was no explanation offered of how the 5-place gap between clubs was to be defined. It might have been at the time of kick-off of the game in question, at the deadline of the Gameweek in which the match is played, or at the deadline of the Gameweek in which the chip first becomes active,.... or at the moment that the chip is played (all perfectly possible, and all potentially very different!!). 

It now seems that they intend that the gap is measured at the start of the Gameweek in which the indiviidual match is played (although the wording still isn't absolutely clear on that point: "at the start of the Gameweek" isn't enough, when a number of different Gameweeks mght be understood as relevant to the applicaton of the rule; they really need a few more words in there to specify what they mean with absolute precision). And the (late added?) ability to change 'assistant managers' from one Gameweek to the next potentially gets over the problem that it would be nearly impossible to predict where or how big gaps in the league table would be more than one week in advance (particularly with the middle of the table so congested as it is so far this year: there are currently only 8 points separating 3rd and 13th positions, and only 5 points between 4th and 12th!). However, I think most FPL managers were originally expecting - and probably hoping - that this would be a set-and-forget deal where you simply chose one manager for the chip for all three gameweeks. (The 'club quota' rule will restrict the extent to which anyone can take advantage of this facility: you're not going to want to waste transfers on removing someone from your squad when you happen to have three players from the club with the most promising manager for that gameweek; you'll probably rather pass on that manager option than use a transfer, and sacrifice a top player [when you treble up on a club, it's because you regard all three of those players as extremely valuable....]. Hence, most FPL managers will have at least one, maybe two or three clubs whose managers are effecively excluded from consideration for this chip.)

And one final potential problem on this: the league's ranking is occasionally determined on alphabetical order alone. Now, this is really just a formatting convention; I believe there are 'tie-break' rules in place - even if it's ultimately just a coin-toss?! - for deciding the crucial European qualification and relegation places at the end of the season. And in practice, everyone considers teams with equal points, goal difference, and goals scored to be in a tie - even though one of them will be listed higher than the other. It would seem rather unfair, for the application of this aspect of the chip, if two such clubs were not to be treated equally - i.e., that they're not both regarded as 5 places above your manager's team, even though one of them is listed only 4 places above. It might be an unlikely eventuality, perhaps one that won't arise this year; but it is something that the FPL gnomes ought to have considered and clarified in framing the rules for the new chip - and they have omitted to do so.

5)  There is, I feel, a dangerous lack of proportionality about this chip. It is potentially worth 2 to 3 times as much as the other two bonus chips combined! And since it is offering points for team results as well as game actions, and over a number of weeks rather than just one, its minimum return will certainly be far higher (as the other chips carry a significant risk of returning zero points, or close-to-zero; the 'Assistant Manager' chip clearly does not); its average return is likely to be far higher too. And it's difficult to gauge what its upper-end might be; but certainly far, far more - perhaps over just one week, and certainly over its full three-week span - than the Triple Captain chip... and substantially more than the Bench Boost (unless you manage to get a very, very good return from that in a Double Gameweek).

Thus, it will be the single biggest determinant of FPL rank outcomes this year. (Well, after terrible refereeing decisions, anyway....)  And that, to me, does not seem FAIR.

6)  There are still a number of lacunae in the 'rules', unexplained gaps about how things are supposed to work with this chip.

They seem to have now added in a gloss about a manager leaving a club having no impact on the chip: you will continue to get the points from that manager's (former) club, unless you select a new manager. (Thus, it's not really a 'manager' chip at all, but a 'club' chip.) That seems somewhat illogical and unfair: if you're supposed to be getting points for the manager, you would expect to stop getting points for him if he loses his job... or start getting points for him from a new club, if he switches clubs.

And this still doesn't address the issue that there can be a number of other ways in which the manager may not actually be 'managing' the club, without having left it. If his assistant has taken over because he's absent with illness or a personal problem - why should you still get points for your manager? If he's serving a touchline ban and not able to coach the team directly this week - why should you still get points for you manager?  If he's been suspended because of allegations of misconduct - why should you still get points for your manager?  Most people would surely feel that you shouldn't (just as you shouldn't - but apparently will - when he's been sacked by his club!). 

However, at the moment, I suppose we must assume that the intention is that this is really a 'club' chip, and you keep getting points from the designated club, regardless of the status of the manager - but this hasn't yet been explicitly stated. And I suspect this has the potential to cause some controversy later on - particularly if we had a manager suspended by his club in a 'Me Too' case.

Moreover, the rules also fail so far to specify whether you can choose to go without an 'assistant manager' during one of the gameweeks that the chip has been activated for (if you perhaps decided that you'd just much rather bring a more expensive player into your starting eleven than continue with a manager that week). I suspect that the interface won't let you remove a manager without adding a replacement; but they don't appear to have said as much (yet). 

In addition, the rules appear to remain silent thus far on whether there is any possibility to cancel the chip before its three-week span is up. As I went on to elaborate more fully here, a raft of unexpected postponements could be devastating if you're not able to to use the Free Hit to create a workaround squad. And if you had your 'Assistant Manager Chip' in play in such a gameweek, you'd almost certainly want to cancel it, if you could. And to me, it would seem fair that you should be able to do so - voluntarily giving up the benefits of the remaining weeks of the chip (perhaps even all three of them!) for some more immediate advantage. However, I imagine that the absence of provision for this in the rules is intended to mean that it won't be possible. [This point was subsequently clarified; but it had not appeared in the first published version of the 'rules' for the new chip.]

I think there's potentially also some doubt as to whether you could choose to use the 'Assistant Manager Chip' for less than the full three weeks by playing it right at the end of the season. Again, I suspect the chip will cease to be available after Gameweek 36; but this hasn't been specified as yet.

7)  There is also - as yet - no reference to whether the chosen manager would be subject to penalties for receiving yellow or red cards in a game. The commonsense answer would be YES, since the chip is represented as making the selection of a manager directly analogous to that of your players. But since the rules omit to say anything about this, we should probably assume that the answer is in fact intended by FPL to be NO.

8)  For some unstated reason, the launch of the chip has been delayed until Gameweek 24, at the beginning of February (originally it was said that it would become available at the beginning of the second half of the season - i.e. from Gameweek 20). Because of the chip's bloated duration, this actually leaves fairly little time in which to take advantage of it; and it will be difficult to juggle it around other priorities for using the other chips. [I discussed this problem much more thoroughly in a further post a few days later.]  

Also, of course, with the late-season reschedulings around the League Cup Final and the FA Quarters and Semi-Finals, we often don't get three weeks' notice of the new fixture dates. So, trying to plan how to use this new chip alongside the existing ones is just going to be horrendous.

Again, there was originally no explicit statement as to whether the new chip would follow the usual rule that only one chip may be played at a time. Since it is utterly unlike any of the other chips in any other respect, it was not unreasonable to suppose that it might not abide by the one-at-a-time rule - and that is what many FPL managers seemed to hopefully assume at first. But now there has been a clarification that other chips will not be available during the three weeks this chip is active. And that..... is a HUGE pain-in-the-arse.

This 'Assistant Manager' Chip is just a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE idea - ill thought-out, clunkily implemented, unclear in its details, maddeningly over-complex, utterly divorced from the usual format of the game we so love. It actually threatens to ruin the game this year.

And I would strongly recommend people to boycott using this silly chip.... or to give up the game altogether, before it starts being spoiled by people using the chip - in Gameweek 23.  

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip

I HATE the 'Assistant Manager' chip (Short version)

 

Last week, FPL unveiled its big innovation for the second half of this season: the new 'chip', previously identified only as a 'Mystery Chip', is now revealed as the 'Assistant Manager' chip.

In the intitial announcements on the FPL Facebook page, there was a terrifying lack of detail about how this - insanely complicated - new bonus was actually going to work. And although they rushed to revise and amplify the rules concerning it, I fear there are still a few holes in them. I think I will have a more extended rant enumerating the many insanities and inanities of this silly new gimmick soon; but I will try to keep this initial response to the news fairly brief.

What I love about this game of ours is its simplicity. It is closely tied to the game we love to watch every week, English Premier League football. It makes you a virtual 'manager', allowing you to assemble a squad of players and choose a starting eleven each gameweek, and to earn points for specified game actions by the individual players you've chosen within each gameweek.

I've said before that I don't particularly like the game's current 'bonus chips' (a relatively late introduction), as they are superfluous to the regular gameplay, and an irksome additional element of randomization (you only have about a one-in-three chance of getting much from them, and perhaps only a one-in-ten chance or less of doing really well from one of them). However, they do at least fit within the regular structure of the game: they simply give you more points for things you already earn points for.

This new bonus chip is something completely different, it falls entirely outside the points structure of the game as we know it. Instead of points for individual player performances in a single gameweek, it gives us points for team results over a run of gameweeks. So, it is essentially a completely separate side-game crudely grafted on to the game that we enjoy at the moment. 

Moreover, with the existing bonus chips that I don't like, there is at least some proportionality: the chips can be worth little or nothing if you get unlucky with them, and rarely yield much more than 15-20 points for each. This new chip is potentially worth such a HUGE number of points that it will completely distort the outcomes of the game - and will thus, alas, be impossible for most FPL managers to resist using (though I'd really love to see a mass boycott of this abomination).

To make things even worse, the new chip doesn't just offer points for one thing, but for a whole range of things: not just for wins or draws, but also for goals and clean sheets. And it offers yet a further set of potential bonus points for gaining a win or draw against a team currently well above your chosen manager's team in the league ranking. And, unlike any of the other chips that have ever been tried in this or any similar game, they want to impose 'charges' for it. You will need to give up a small amount of your player budget to play the chip, and also sacrifice part of your player quota from the club you pick for it - over-complication upon over-complication upon over-complication, all completely needless.

It might be an intriguing challenge, but... it has absolutely NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REGULAR GAME. It is a gimmicky side-game idea that would be better accommodated within the occasional 'Fantasy Challenge' series.